Cloud can be Disappointing

Bangalore: Cloud Computing is the latest buzz and has been in the news for quite sometime now, unsurprisingly most of the companies around have already adopted cloud or have plans to be a part of this trend either ways, companies are counting on this technology but hold on, for those who have high expectations Cloud computing can actually be disappointing.

When the IT industry talks about the cloud they simplify it so much that Cloud computing seems like the IT equal of the messianic era, a cure and solution for all IT issues, But an in-depth and extensive study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research has revealed cloud computing isn't all that simple, as per Julie Bort’s report in Business Insider.

The Study conducted by the U.S. department was on its own private test-bed cloud which extremely complex with and got its own name ‘Magellan’ project. This project was aimed at; in what way cloud can be used to serve scientists who require large and expensive computers to store their scientific experiments data.

The Researchers at Magellan project built in house Cloud computers and ran real time scientif programs on them, they built the test bed cloud, the so-called "private clouds" were built using huge IBM servers with large amount of networking and storage capacity and ran popular open source cloud applications like Hadoop. They also compared performance, cost, security issues etc with Amazon’s public servers by putting applications on them.

The conclusions of the study showed that, cloud computing was quite a pain to use and not always cost- effective, except for some particular types of applications.

The report said that the biggest challenge faced was reliability, performance and scalability. The study also revealed that public clouds can actually be more expensive in comparison with in-house large systems, plus it said clouds aren’t exactly a set-and-go service as there is major programming and system administration support required.

Nevertheless the brighter side of the Magellan project is that the report also says that clouds can comparatively be a good option of specific applications that do not require a lot of input or output.